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Is worker participation becoming more prominent or less? Furthermore, what is the impact of worker participation on economic performance? This article introduces a tool designed by researchers at the ETUI to help answer these questions: the European Participation Index (EPI), a country-level summary measure of the strength of workers’ voice in companies. The EPI is based on (i) union density and collective bargaining coverage, (ii) workplace representation and (iii) board-level representation. This multi-level index provides an alternative to existing cross-national measures by taking into consideration two levels at which worker participation can take place: the workplace and the board. The article shows first that worker participation has become less prevalent in the EU over the past decade; and second that the EPI is robust and has superior explanatory power in relation to income inequality compared with traditional measures of collective bargaining.
Spiegelaere et al. (Wed,) studied this question.